(10-08-2015, 06:33 AM)ocre Wrote: Bofox,
It is easy to say stuff like that. "rampage was so great it would have blown everything out of the water" and "it was complete and ready but we had to lay everyone off before it could be mass produced."
talk is cheap. We always here stuff like that. Remember AMD and how they were building a true quad core CPU. A native quad and how much better it was supposed would be than intel's method of stacking two dual cores together. Remember all the hype before Bulldozer and how it was supposed to not onlyt put AMD back in the game but people literally expected it to bulldoze intel. See had AMD went belly up just before any of those architectures, those hyped up rumors would have survived and that is what we would remember them as....not what they actually turned out to be. See, no one expected the pathetic outcome of the original phenom. It was an absolute surprise but not in a good way. The bulldozer was epic as well, an epic failure to such a degree it too was hard to imagine....although by then, there were people who didnt expect much from AMD but even then, very few people thought it would turn out as bad as it did.
It is easy to imagine that 3DFX was just about to release a come back GPU that would surpass everyone else. Actually, as a chip maker in those days, it was an expectation that your fresh new launching chip surpasses other chips that were already out on the market.
It is easy to things and talk is cheap.
the link you have tells us that the Rampage was a long way from launching. Minimum 6 months, realistically up to a yr.
This would have put it launching in 2001. Since we dont know anything but some paper specs, no one could possibly know if it actually would have blown anything out of the water. There is more to it than bandwidth, a lot more to it. For starters, drivers. The "Specter" would have to run DX games, how well they done this is anyones guess.
Paper specs mean little, we all know that. Especially though, this couldnt be more true when we are talking about GPUs. But going by paper specs alone, if we look at the specter specs from wiki, those dont support the guy claiming that it was so far ahead of nvidia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3dfx_Inter...bankruptcy
scroll to the spectre "Rampage" on the chart.
now look at nvidias
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nv...sing_units
The spectre doesnt look very impressive paper spec wise compared to the Geforce2 gts/pro, which would already have been out. Paper specs alone, its not impressive unless you consider their imaginary x2 card. There existed not a single one, not even an engineering sample. They literally just added the specs together, to represent a card that is made up in imaginations only. It was imagined to be two chips on one PCB. Whether or not that was feasible or how well it scaled is anyone's guess.
Just for the record, the voodoo5 6000 (that unreleased GPU that had a whopping 4 VSA-100 chips on it) had jaw dropping paper specs but in actual performance it would be demolished by the Geforce2.
http://www.x86-secret.com/articles/diver...6kgb-7.htm
The voodoo5 6000 wasnt even feasible in its day. Most people would have literally had to buy an extra power supply just to run that card. But 3DFX was such a mess at this time that they were not only dreaming up these things, they actually were telling the press it was on its way.
But lets forget about the terrible idea of 4 chips on a single PCB. If we look at the Voodoo5 5500, which was a dual VSA-100 power suckle, with its awesome paper specs it couldnt keep up with a geforce1 the geforce 256DDR.
So, the specs of their dual rampage are much more meaningless than the specs of the single chip versions. The scaling of twice a single chip is a joke. The paper specs of the 3DFX Rampage arent impressive, not the Spectre 1000 or the 2000. These specs were not impressive for the 2000-2001 era.
We just have a case where people attached to the company really wanted to see them do something great. And just like the phenom and bulldozer, this thing got hyped up. Sure, i would have loved to see what a rampage could have done in the real world. But that is the thing, they were a long way from launching. Drivers and games are very different than theoretical performance. We dont know how well it could have really done.
Just like today, we hear all this hype about AMDs Zen. If AMD goes under, this hype is all people will know about. That is how it will be remembered. See, 3DFX was a long way from launching their rampage. They just got the Voodoo5 x2 5500 chip out and went under. If you ask me, the rampage was at least a yr away from feasibility when the company went under, it wasnt ready for manufacture. It is hard for me to see how it could have saved them at all.
OpenGL was always Nvidia's strength. Even TNT2 Ultra gave Voodoo3 3500 a serious run for its money in Quake3, in 16-bit color mode. Voodoo5 6000 still came within a few % of Geforce2 GTS in Quake3, at 1280x1024 resolution. The scaling was wonderful for that resolution.
It was quite simple to do SLI back then. Surely, it would have been ready as well, if 3dfx didn't have all of these financial problems. Obviously, R&D was being cut, projects were being delayed, etc.. But then again, putting 2 of these chips on a card was something 3dfx engineers could easily do, as proven with the awesome Voodoo5 5500 that I had (awesome for full AA in games just a couple years old like Need for Speed 3, etc..). The Rampage Specter 3000 would've mopped the floor with Geforce 2 Ultra, the first $500 gaming card. With DX8 and additional DX9 capabilities, even Geforce3 would've had a hard time keeping up with the dual Specter with Sage T&L unit. Apparently, you missed this part:
Quote:Although there's only 1 TMU per pipe, the chip can out match the NV20 in Multi-texturing as it can apply 8 textures in a single pass. This is done using Rampage's texture computer and its unique "loopback" function.
And this part as well: "The REV-A1 boards screamed. We were laid off on Friday we had debugged that board till Thursday night. It ran Quake3, It would have been a real threat to Nvidia due to cost and performance. We hit 250 Mhz DDR"
Why would they lie about it, long after it's been history, long after 3dfx was out of business?? Anyway, the blogger does not claim that Rampage would've saved the company - being humble enough to say
Quote:"Could Rampage have saved the company? Without knowing all the facts it is tough to say, but it would have been another 6 months before the first SPECTER boards started showing up on the shelves with only the Daytona and the older Napalm chips to shoulder the burden till then. The Specter family of boards was very powerful and would have outperformed any other current graphics solutions by a wide margin."
Well, 3dfx was already doomed with the delayed Voodoo5 anyway. If they never bought STB, it would have been delivered at least 6 months earlier, preventing some more of the damage that Nvidia was doing with their full 32-bit color support (with a heavy 50% performance hit that was usually not feasible until the DDR version of Geforce), and their heavily advertised T&L unit that was not practical until Max Payne a couple years later (when Geforce3 was out anyway). 3dfx would've continued to work hard on their projects, perhaps even hiring more engineers, and delivered Rampage before Nvidia's Geforce3.
But Ocre, maybe you're right - like the plagued Voodoo5 6000 that was never really fixed, perhaps 3dfx would've also had issues with Rampage in SLI and with that T&L unit. It would've been kickass to have RGMSAA and 16x AF long before Nvidia or ATI made these features feasible. Just imagine how much better games would've looked with at least 8x AF with its efficient 8-pass "loopback" texturing function?
Also, I held onto my Voodoo5 5500 for years, for optimal Glide experience with key games such as Unreal Tournament, Half Life, etc.. Couldn't stand the glide wrappers that not even my Geforce4 Ti could handle as nicely. Glide might have lived on a bit more if Voodoo5 wasn't delayed, and especially if Rampage was produced.
Ahh, nostalgia during my most crazed gaming period of my life! When playing games so much, for hours and hours, more IQ could not be overvalued.